However, the offshoot in Aberystwyth seems little more than an afterthought. It contains no explanatory or contextualising wall text – providing little in the way of an entry point for viewers unfamiliar with his work – though desperation may lead one to a few pamphlets (from the original Rivington Place exhibition, which included many works not on display here) dumped in a corner. The general visitor demographic seemed to be largely local families with toddlers, who used the two dry walls installed in the centre of the small space for games of hide and seek.
Curiously, though, the notion of 'hide and seek' – looking for the elusive, searching in the shadows – is an unexpectedly fitting strategy for engaging with, and framing, Mofokeng's photography. (And this is all the more true in an exhibition which appears based on a misplaced assumption of photography's self-evident indexicality). As has been pointed out (in writing both about and by Mofokeng), although part of the Afrapix collective in the 1980s, he was uncomfortable with the overt rhetoric of its documentary style, and the way in which the international media participated in a reductive imaging of black South African lived experience during apartheid. Police with Sjamboks (1989), a central image on the front wall of the Aberystwyth exhibition, recalls how Mofokeng came to understand the pressure of 'solidarity politics', and its intersection with international market forces: 'If I show a picture of a policeman it's a good picture. If I show pictures of two policeman it's even better... that is how I came to categorise the work I was doing at the time... If I show three policemen then that's front page...' A similar unease, as well as a measure of retrospective self-critique, has been articulated by other photographers such as Gideon Mendel and Guy Tillim. Mofokeng was one of the first to shift his photographic aesthetic to the poetics of the everyday, the fleeting, the insidious, and it is those images which make up the bulk of this exhibition.
The exhibition relies – perhaps lazily – on many of Mofokeng's most famous, and most reproduced, photographs; a kind of 'greatest hits' summary of decades of diverse work, without meaningful curatorial articulation of continuity and/or change (to be fair, this may be a necessary function of limited space). The large-scale Ishmael: Eyes Wide Shut (2004); The Buddhist Retreat (2003); and Sacral Animals (2003) line one wall, while other well-known images such as Winter in Thembisa (1989) and Democracy is Forever (2004) are randomly scattered at regular intervals. Jumbled as the arrangement initially seems (though some are clustered with others from the same series), closer investigation reveals unexpectedly lyrical relationships, such as the visual parallel between an image of RDP housing along the N7 (2002), and one of the similarly grid-like structures of the Women's Section, Auschwitz, taken in 1997.
In Mofokeng's work, one is always drawn to seek below the surface, to follow signs of movement, and elusive traces of presence. In the frequent blurs of figures from his body of works on Zionist Apostolic rituals performed at the sacred site of the Motouleng Caves in the Freestate, Mofekeng captures the esoteric and the transformative, purposely negating the stark clarity of documentary style. Images from the 'Billboards' series include the reflections and refractions of the car windscreen through which Mofokeng shoots familiar urban scenes of highways, roadsigns and advertising injunctions. These acknowledge the mediating presence both of the photographer, and of the contemporary marketing strategies that constantly crowd our field of vision.
One scattered narrative dispersed across the exhibition is the way in which human presence can be powerfully evoked through the elegiac lens of corporeal absence, for example in Limbless Doll, Jakkalsfontein, or Mirror and Jug, Alexandra (both 1989). Here, ciphers of life's necessary, if unremarkable, rituals – washing, playing, eating – become the stuff of poetry even as they speak to the continued realities of socio-economic inequality. Most haunting are works in which Mofokeng has photographed sites around the world that are invested with horrific memories, such as Auschwitz, Hanoi, and a desert intersection between Luderitz and Aus, Namibia. Mofokeng frames unsensational scenes: a lake surrounded by trees, train tracks crossing and receding into the distance, endless undulating dunes. Yet below and beyond each landscape (as is revealed in accompanying titles) lies real historical trauma, interred and displaced by what Jessica Dubow and Ruth Rosengarten have referred to as nature's 'tenacious capacity to outlive the past, to surpass rather than to recall those events and violences played out on its surface'.
From urban intersections to religious sites, intimate domestic tableaux to vast scenes of seemingly subterranean trauma, Mofokeng's photographs examine – and in many ways trigger – the persistence of individual and collective memory, as well as revealing the contested ownership and expression of that memory. Where and how it is variously inscribed, reinterpreted, veiled or enacted can be read in the shifting semiotics of landscape, if one is willing to take up the challenge to seek out what is hidden, what lies just beyond the line of sight. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that many of the subtleties of Mofokeng's work are being communicated to the general public – which, after all, is Autograph ABP's aim – in this haphazard exhibition. Instead it reads as a combination of compelling, but decontextualised leftovers selected from a larger, more curatorially coherent show which was clearly better suited to dealing with the scope of Mofokeng's complex career.
